Unruly Comparison

In <i>Unruly Comparison</i> Alvin K. Wong examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature cinema visual culture and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison-acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist colonial and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy Chinese rule or global capital. Wong analyzes queer interracial desire in WWII; a cinema of gay male cosmopolitanism; queer intimacy among migrant workers; trans visuality and legality; cross-border sex work; and the queer diaspora of Hong Kong after the 2019 protests. Through Wong's readings Hong Kong becomes a queer region of racial gender and sexual incommensurability. By foregrounding the friction asymmetry and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.